DisasterAlexandria Ocasio-Cortez Megathread - because you guys can't shut up about this chick

JavaScript is disabled. For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding.

If you are from New Zealand, your government is hunting you. Read this letter from NZ Police, then change your email address if you're using a personal account. Start using a VPN everywhere. I'm setting data retention to zero for the immediate future. Warrant canary is in the footer.

ǝƃuɐɥɔƆMƆ

Haha, horseteeth is bashing the New Deal for apparently only helping wypipo, despite her beloved Green New Deal being named after it and fact it formed the basis of America's welfare state, while simultaneously saying Reagan's welfare queen neologism was a dog whistle about big black woman. Too bad the term was used years before, originally describing a white woman in Chicago named Linda Taylor.

Listening to her rambling is like a six-year-old reading mad libs with all the blanks nonsensically being filled with stuff libtards hate.

“Amount President Trump has transferred from other agencies to fund his ‘Build the Wall’ Emergency: $10s of millions, & has identified billions more. Amount he’s transferred to address the Opioid National Emergency: $0”

C-SPAN tweeted out a five-minute clip of Ocasio-Cortez questioning James W. Carroll, the White House’s director of drug policy, with this quote highlighted: “@AOC compares #OpioidCrisis to #SouthernBorder: ‘So, we’ve got two emergencies, one is treated with an actual action and the other is just to raise awareness.’ "

Ocasio-Cortez then retweeted it with the comment above, earning nearly 50,000 retweets and likes.

In her questioning, Ocasio-Cortez focused especially on the Public Health Emergency Fund — according to the Government Accountability Office, the fund has just $57,000 in it — and whether the declaration of a public health crisis regarding opioids should have triggered a transfer of money from other agencies, a la Trump’s maneuvers to build a wall.

“Did the declaration of a public health emergency for opioids make any additional funding available to expand treatment for individuals for overdose to provide services for people in recovery?” she asked.

But Ocasio-Cortez is making a highly misleading comparison. Here’s what’s going on.

The Facts
Earlier this year, Trump demanded $5.7 billion to fund his proposed border wall. Congress refused to do so, even after Trump engineered a lengthy government shutdown. So he declared a national emergency and said he would transfer funds from other agency accounts. Ultimately, the courts will sort out whether he has the power to override the congressional control of the purse.

In the case of the opioid crisis, Trump in August 2017 acted on the recommendations of a task force on the crisis and “instructed his administration to use all appropriate emergency and other authorities to respond to the crisis caused by the opioid epidemic,” the White House said. In October 2017, acting health and human services secretary Eric D. Hargan said that, at Trump’s instruction, he had declared a “nationwide public health emergency.” The declaration has been renewed five times.

Such declarations allow the HHS secretary to take a variety of steps, including using money appropriated for the Public Health Emergency Fund.

After the declaration, Congress appropriated more than $6 billion to combat the opioid crisis, including $4.4 billion in the fiscal 2019 spending bill. The bill included $1.5 billion in state response grants, $500 million for research, $475.6 million for prescription drug overdose prevention, $120 million for rural communities and $89 million for medication-assisted treatment for addiction; it also gave the director of the National Institutes of Health the ability to transfer funds “specifically appropriated for opioid addiction, opioid alternatives, pain management, and addiction treatment.”

In other words, the situations are not comparable. Trump wanted almost $6 billion for his wall, which Congress refused. But Congress acted to give the administration more than $6 billion for the opioid crisis, so there was little need for him to transfer funds without congressional authorization.

Ocasio-Cortez asked whether there was additional funding for overdose victims and people seeking recovery — and the answer is yes.

In a red herring, at the hearing Ocasio-Cortez focused on the fact that there was only $57,000 in the Public Health Emergency Fund. This is a relic from 1983 that has rarely been used.

“Between 1988 and 2000, the fund was authorized for annual appropriations sufficient to have a balance of $45 million at the beginning of each fiscal year,” said a report by the Congressional Research Service. “Despite this prior authorization of annual appropriations, the fund received appropriations only in response to a few public health threats (e.g., the emergence of hantavirus in the Southwest in 1993-1994), but did not receive an appropriation for its intended use as a reserve fund for unanticipated events.”

In the GAO report, HHS explained that it was not necessary to tap this fund to deal with the opioid crisis. “Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) officials determined that other authorities could be used, rather than public health emergency authorities,” the report said. “HHS also provided evidence that the Public Health Emergency Fund currently contains approximately $57,000.” It was last used more than a quarter-century ago.

The Pinocchio Test
Ocasio-Cortez is making a misleading comparison. Trump has no need to transfer billions of dollars for the opioid emergency because Congress already has appropriated billions of dollars. Trump’s backing of a national public-health emergency did more than raise awareness; it triggered a congressional response. So it’s the exact opposite of the standoff over the wall.

One can question the effectiveness of the Trump response to the opioid epidemic without resorting to red herrings and false equivalency. Only in the most narrow technical way is her statement correct, so we cannot quite consider this a Four-Pinocchio claim. So Ocasio-Cortez earns three.

The convoluted connection she's trying to make is that Wells Fargo, for a time, invested in private prison companies, including (apparently) the ones responsible for administering those ICE detention facilities during the Obama administration.

Still exceptional to think the bank either knew or was directly involved in the kid cages, but she's not running political mad libs or anything, just overdosing on guilt by association.
Also "children in cages" is clearly AOC's blarms and it's a stupid as fuck hill to die on when the immediate response is a) Obama done did it, and b) would you prefer we let the kids stay with the coyotes or other human traffickers bringing them into this country instead of making an effort to find their actual parents?

The AFL-CIO, the national arm for U.S. labor unions, offered a critical assessment of the Green New Deal, warning that the ambitious plan to combat climate change could adversely affect U.S. workers.

In a letter last week to Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), the lawmakers who introduced a resolution last month detailing the key components of their plan, members of the AFL-CIO’s Energy Committee said it could not support a proposal that did not address their concerns.

“We will not stand by and allow threats to our members’ jobs and their families’ standard of living go unanswered,” wrote Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers of America, and Lonnie Stephenson, president of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

The Green New Deal resolution, as proposed by Markey and Ocasio-Cortez, calls for the federal government to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions with a “fair and just transition” for all communities and workers, including by creating millions of high-wage jobs, health care and housing for all, a sustainable environment and enormous infrastructure investments.

The proposal would make sweeping changes and expand the government’s reach into the economy, and it almost certainly would require tax increases or large-scale deficit spending.

It entered the national conversation when Ocasio-Cortez adopted it as her calling card. The proposal marries climate change and income inequality as one all-encompassing issue.

Support for the Green New Deal has become a benchmark for Democrats running for president.

But the AFL-CIO throwing water on the plan complicates matters for Democrats who rely on labor support. Without the backing from unions or the business community, it will be a hard sell for Democrats to get it beyond grass-roots support.

In their letter to Markey and Ocasio-Cortez, Roberts and Stephenson called the Green New Deal “not achievable or realistic.” They urged the lawmakers to include labor in conversations related to climate change, but they said such work shouldn’t impinge on other priorities such as infrastructure.

Markey fired back on Twitter: “We will continue to work and partner w/ @AFLCIO, who is right to say that ‘doing nothing is not an option.’ But until Republicans say that climate change is real, caused by humans, and demands action now, the only people they are in agreement with are Big Oil and the Koch brothers.”

In the fall, the top scientific body studying climate change found that the world had to take “unprecedented” steps to reduce carbon levels, with the globe on pace to warm by 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) over preindustrial levels.

The Trump administration has not proposed a comprehensive agenda for addressing climate change. It has dismantled some initiatives supported by the past administration to check the growth of greenhouse gases.

President Trump has repeatedly questioned the scientific consensus that global warming is occurring. Just Tuesday morning, Trump tweeteda quote from “Fox and Friends,” where a guest said: “The whole climate crisis is not only Fake News, it’s Fake Science. There is no climate crisis, there’s weather and climate all around the world, and in fact carbon dioxide is the main building block of all life.” Trump added: “Wow!”

The Green New Deal has become a favorite foil for Trump and congressional Republicans. Trump mocked the plan in a speech to conservatives last week, pretending to ask his wife to check the wind to determine whether they could watch television.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has said he wants to bring the proposal to a vote to force Democrats to take a stand on it.

Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.) said Tuesday the Green New Deal risks alienating labor groups, giving Republicans an opportunity with voters who side with conservatives on issues such as gun control and abortion. Exit polling from the 2016 presidential election showed a sharp decline for Democrats in support among union households.

“If Republicans play it smart and stop antagonizing labor, there’s a real opening for us,” King said.

Co-chairs of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Reps. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) and Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), acknowledged during a news conference Tuesday that labor groups have some concerns with the Green New Deal.

“Anything we move forward on, we have to be recognizing that people could lose jobs,” Pocan said.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told reporters on Capitol Hill last week that labor was not consulted on the Green New Deal before it was released.

“Look, we need to address the environment. We need to do it quickly,” he said. “But we need to do it in a way that doesn’t put these communities behind, and leave segments of the economy behind. So we’ll be working to make sure that we do two things: that by fixing one thing we don’t create a problem somewhere else.”

There has long been tension between the environmental and labor movements, two major parts of the broader Democratic coalition, over worries that rules meant to curb pollution can lead to job losses in regulated industries with high-quality, good-paying positions.

The crafters of the Green New Deal sought to smooth over those concerns by incorporating into their proposal a “fair and just transition for all communities and workers” as the United States seeks to drive down climate-warming emissions from the electricity, transportation and agriculture sectors.

The resolution called for any economic transition to create “high-quality union jobs” and guarantee “wage and benefit parity for workers affected by the transition.”

Robert Hockett, a law professor at Cornell University who advised Ocasio-Cortez on the Green New Deal, argued the apprehension is misplaced because new environmental protections can lead to job growth elsewhere.

“They are probably objecting prematurely,” Hockett said. “It has become customary to think of these as separate problems.”

Yet even before Markey and Ocasio-Cortez released their Green New Deal resolution, some heavy-industry unions were already posturing against it.

Seven unions representing ironworkers, plumbers, electrical workers, boilermakers, sheet metal workers, transportation communication workers and coal miners began late last year sending a white paper to congressional offices expressing “grave concerns about unrealistic solutions such as those advocated in the ‘Green New Deal.’ ”

Instead, the unions said a cap-and-trade proposal such as the one Democrats under President Barack Obama tried and failed to pass in 2009 was a better “starting point” for new legislation.

Markey, then a member of the House, was a lead sponsor of that bill.

John Risch, who worked as a locomotive engineer for 30 years before becoming the national legislative director at the transportation division of one of the unions, the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail, and Transportation Workers, worried that any promise of a “just transition” for his members hauling coal and oil by train would end up being empty.

“We are not knuckle-draggers,” Risch said. “We’re concerned about climate change. We want to do something positive. But there are a lot of jobs on the lines.”

At least one of the main Green New Deal sponsors is recognizing — and trying to heal — the rift between environmental and labor groups over it.

Last week, staffers working for Markey met with Phil Smith, the head of communications and government affairs for the United Mine Workers of America, after the senator’s office reached out to the nation’s most prominent coal-mining union.

Smith called his meeting “a good first step.”

Still, he called the Green New Deal’s ambitions to meet all of the nation’s electric power needs with “clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources” within a decade a nonstarter, with coal still accounting for more than a quarter of the country’s electricity generation.

Meatbag's Bounty of Bodies

The convoluted connection she's trying to make is that Wells Fargo, for a time, invested in private prison companies, including (apparently) the ones responsible for administering those ICE detention facilities during the Obama administration.

Still exceptional to think the bank either knew or was directly involved in the kid cages, but she's not running political mad libs or anything, just overdosing on guilt by association.
Also "children in cages" is clearly AOC's blarms and it's a stupid as fuck hill to die on when the immediate response is a) Obama done did it, and b) would you prefer we let the kids stay with the coyotes or other human traffickers bringing them into this country instead of making an effort to find their actual parents?

I think it's just an excellent example as to how much of a brainless Socialist she really is. The premise of her entire argument is that Wells Fargo run and control everything because they finance activity through loans. She seems to think that the U.S. is already being run under a centralized control by the banks who "really" control everything, so she's projecting the Socialist model of centralized control onto the entire banking industry because it's the only model she even understands, so she wants to replace the banks with people like herself.

It's like saying that a bank should be held responsible for damages if someone took out a loan for a car and then got into an accident.

Close to the edge, just by the Riverlands

The convoluted connection she's trying to make is that Wells Fargo, for a time, invested in private prison companies, including (apparently) the ones responsible for administering those ICE detention facilities during the Obama administration.

Still exceptional to think the bank either knew or was directly involved in the kid cages, but she's not running political mad libs or anything, just overdosing on guilt by association.
Also "children in cages" is clearly AOC's blarms and it's a stupid as fuck hill to die on when the immediate response is a) Obama done did it, and b) would you prefer we let the kids stay with the coyotes or other human traffickers bringing them into this country instead of making an effort to find their actual parents?

AOC: "Here today you said Wells Fargo does not put profits over people. Correct?"
Wells Fargo Guy: "That's correct."
AOC: "I'm interested in the human rights abuses and environmental disasters that some say are financed by your bank. In a recent 'Guardian'(LOL) article ... stated Wells Fargo has pursued profits without principles by investing in private prisons for profit immigration, detention centers, loanshark- like payday lending and holding much of the bond debt straining Puerto Rico's efforts to life it out of its financial crisis."

In true AOC fashion, there's an underlying valid point there but she chooses to fixate on the dumbest aspects of the overall argument so she can try and relate it to Latino issues and keep up her rep as the Commie Mami.

Except then everyone is guilty. "Wells Fargo gave a loan which funded that prison! You are guilty!" --- "Wait, i'm not even an investor in Wells Fargo" --- "Yes you are! Your monthly paycheck gets deposited in their bank!" --- "That doesn't mean I'm responsible" --- "Yes you are! You give them your money for their profit in exchange for your convenience,! You and a million more like you!"

If above the table investments and stock trading make one culpable, then so does paying to fly from New York to your job in DC, or wearing Nike. I'm actually thinking she's just a troll.

Close to the edge, just by the Riverlands

Except then everyone is guilty. "Wells Fargo gave a loan which funded that prison! You are guilty!" --- "Wait, i'm not even an investor in Wells Fargo" --- "Yes you are! Your monthly paycheck gets deposited in their bank!" --- "That doesn't mean I'm responsible" --- "Yes you are! You give them your money for their profit in exchange for your convenience,! You and a million more like you!"

If above the table investments and stock trading make one culpable, then so does paying to fly from New York to your job in DC, or wearing Nike. I'm actually thinking she's just a troll.

You have to remember, what this woman is doing is not thoughtful, reasoned dissent or discourse. It is verbal tweeting from congress. There is no thought put into the attempt at a "gotcha", save for roughly the same amount that goes into deciding whether the thought will fit into 280 characters or will have to be a "tweetstorm".

Go to page

Go to page

Go to page

About Us

The Kiwi Farms is about eccentric individuals and communities on the Internet.
We call them lolcows because they can be milked for amusement or laughs.
Our community is bizarrely diverse and spectators are encouraged to join the discussion.

We do not place intrusive ads, host malware, sell data, or run crypto miners with your browser.
If you experience these things, you have a virus.
If your malware system says otherwise, it is faulty.

"The theory that Connors was a hoax started gaining serious traction over the weekend on a message board called Kiwi Farms (you can read some of that here, if you really want to go deep on this thing)."